In the spirit of sharing, yesterday was Good Friday and a friend and I took advantage of the holiday to visit Toronto and the Kensington Market.
It has been many years since I last visited the Toronto Island ferry docks and walked the lakeshore, so much has changed. I got to see one of the Porter Airline planes land at the island airstrip and it made quite a racket, I can see why a lot of people who live nearby are up-in-arms about Porter's request to fly jet planes from the island.
The condominium buildings that line the shore are something to see. Thirty four years ago, when I arrived in Toronto, all of that area was still grain silos and derelict buildings and today it is a thriving group of communities. I am not sure how much I would enjoy living in a condo tower though, for all the advantages of having the city at your doorstep and there are a lot, the cost of buying one is more than I would be willing to pay. I also own too much stuff and the psychological damage, of Down Sizing into a much smaller space, is something that I will willingly avoid.
Wandering our way north, stopping for coffee along the way, we made our way into the Chinatown section of Spadina Avenue. We chose to have lunch at the Gold Stone Noodle Restaurant, where we had enjoyed the food on our last play-date, just south of Dundas on the west side of Spadina and it was delicious, their food is the best! I even had left-overs in a box to take home afterwards.
With lunch out of the way, we entered the Market proper and wandered around for a couple of hours in the light drizzle that had begun to fall from the sky. The stores are an eclectic mix of styles and colours, with something for every taste, even comic book stores for a geek like me.
It is interesting, to someone like me, who has collected comic books for over forty years, that the modern comic book store is mostly about the current issues. In the early Seventies, a comic book store HAD to have back-issues and lots of them, because that was why the customers went to them. Comic book collecting had a lot of completists back then, even I had the bug for a while, who needed to have every issue of a comic book title in order to feel satisfied and the newly minted comic book stores of the day catered to that need.
With the modern trend, of collecting the individual monthly issues into trade paperbacked books, the "Holy Grail" attitude, towards missing issues, has all but disappeared.
The Comic Pile, 254 Augusta Avenue, is a nice example of the New Style of comic book store. I wandered in and browsed around but there is nothing there for me. I picked up a bag of Current Size comic book bags while I was there because I am in a phase of renewing the old bags that, in some cases, have protected my comics for over forty years. The old bags were simple polythene and the "off gases" released by the comic books have deteriorated them over the years. Some of the original bags have even turned brittle and flake apart, as I try to change them. Nothing lasts for ever.
"Lost in Space"
Another of my doodles.
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